Hercules and Leo are only 11
years old, but they’ve already come close to retiring twice. The two
chimpanzees, born and raised at Louisiana’s New Iberia Research Center, became
lab animals at the State University of New York in Stony
Brook in 2011. There they shared a three-room enclosure, where scientists
inserted small electrodes into their muscles to study the evolution of
bipedalism. In 2013, they were the subject of an unusual legal gambit. An
animal rights group sued to declare
the pair legal persons and retire them to a Florida sanctuary, but
the effort failed.
Two years later, Hercules and Leo
returned to New Iberia, where they mingled with other chimps in outdoor domes
with ladders and ropes. But retirement to a sanctuary, where they could climb
real trees and have more room to roam, again seemed imminent: The U.S.
government had just effectively ended invasive work on chimpanzees, and many
observers expected all lab chimps to move to sanctuaries in short order. Yet
today, Hercules and Leo, along with nearly 600 of their kind across the
country, remain at research facilities. It’s unclear when—or whether—they’ll
leave.
In the past 2 years, only 73
chimps have entered sanctuaries, and the slow pace has heightened tensions
between the laboratory and sanctuary communities. There’s plenty of blame to go
around. Labs have dragged their feet, sanctuaries haven’t expanded quickly
enough, and the government itself didn’t have a concrete plan for retirement,
despite setting the process in motion in the first place.
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